The Books of My Life: Warrior Nation

I came of intellectual age during the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. I came of age, in other words, in an era in which reasonable and rational skepticism about what "authorities" said became more common and prominent than it had been in the 1950s, an era, at least on the surface, of enforced conformity. It was my friend John Cirillo (sic) who taught me of the need to be skeptical of what politicians said about things such as civil rights, about the war in Vietnam, and about the Watergate burglary. It was thanks to John that I came to realise that a lot of what demagogues, be they politicians or capitalist flim flam men, said, at least in public, was, empirically speaking, little more than--pardon my English--mythhistorical bullshite. 

I wasn't until I went to university that I learned that any analysis worth its salt had to be both critical and skeptical and grounded in the empirical record. At university I was treated to a more empirically and fact based history of the United States, Canada, Australia, and the world than I got in junior and senior high school. It was also at university I realised that much of what I was taught about American history and geography in junior and senior high, such, as, for instance, that it was evil Spain that forced America to go to war in the late nineteenth century to protect American honour and Cuban womanhood, was in large measure myth and, in large measure, bullshite propagated and perpetrated by demagogues allied with imperialist politicians and associated with the yellow journalism of the Hearst newspaper conglomerate. 

As a consequence of my university education it became apparent to me that while many believed that it was, for example, the economy or money that made the world go around, it was really ideology, ways of seeing or perceiving, ways of seeing, that underlay and undergirded notions that it was money made the world go around that really made the world go around. I learned, in other words, that it was socially and and culturally constructed ideologies that mediated "realities" for most humans and which created "reality" for most humans. 

At first, as I recall, I thought higher education might be the much needed cure for mythhistorical bulllshite. It soon became clear to me, however, that the bullshite people are socialised into and enculturated into and indoctrinated with makes the human world go around and that it was difficult if not impossible to counter what humans take on faith because they generally don't recognise that what they have faith in is created through a process of fetishisation, a process in which the parochial and particular are transformed into the universal. 

It is, of course, through socialisation and enculturation that common identities, including a common national identity, and a common culture, including a common national culture, are manufactured and continually remanufactured. As Emile Durkheim noted in his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), culture creates and recreates, with the help of notions of fictive kinship and a common set of myths, symbol, icons, rituals, a common identity and a common sense of community whether on the tribal, clan, or national level. 

It is collective national identity that is the focus of Ian McKay's and Jamie Swift's superb Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2012), McKay and Swift take an ideal type approach to the history of Canadian identity and the culture wars over Canadian identity ever since Canada achieved "independence" from Great Britain in 1867. Despite dominion status and Canadian confederation in 1867, English Canadian culture, English Canadian identity, and English Canadian nationhood, McKay and Swift argue, remained closely tied to imperial British identity and culture. Nicely utilising an approach that melds biography with broader historical and cultural contexts McKay and Swift note that the British imperialist, writer, politician, and Governor-General of Canada John Buchan and the Canadian born adventurer William Stairs, who thought of himself as British and Canadian even when in the employ of the genocidal Leopold II of Belgium, were, embedded in an ethnocentric Victorian and Edwardian British imperial culture that celebrated adventure, exploration, British imperialism and the British White man's burden. This Victorian and Edwardian British culture socialised youth into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of imperialism, adventure, and exploration through material culture like the The Boy's Own Annual. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian White or Northern European sense of racial superiority. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of Christian superiority. It enculturated Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture that preached the superiority of British civilisation. It socialised Canadians into a Victorian and Edwardian culture of manhood tied to gentlemanly sports and gentlemanly explorations of the world's various dark continents. Sports, adventuring, colonisation, and war, many were taught and came to believe, made the man, made the real man. 

This British imperial Canadian culture, as McKay and Swift point out, continues to be significant in English Canada, particularly among Canada's Anglo-Saxons. It was not the only Canadian identity culture, however. In the wake of World War II, a war during which Canadians became more conscious of their own identity and their own culture, an identity and culture that was distinct, at least ideologically, from that of Great Britain. As a result a somewhat new Canadian culture arose and became dominant. This new Canadian culture, McKay and Swift argue, was intimately tied to multiculturalism, to pluralism, to peacekeeping, to diplomacy, and to war, the last, at, least rhetorically, as a final option. This new Canadian identity and culture was homologous with the replacement of Great Britain as the dominant global great power by the United States, by increasing economic and cultural ties between Canada and United States, and by Canada's increasing ties to an increasingly interconnected world. 

McKay and Swift explore this Canadian peacekeeper cosmopolitan culture, one which, as McKay and Swift note, was similar to the Canadian British imperial identity in a number of ways, by exploring the careers of two famous post-World War Two Canadians, soldier Tommy Burns and, who imbibed both the imperial and the more cosmopolitan culture, and Lester Pearson, prime minister of Canada from 1963 to 1968. Pearson actually embodies, as McKay and Swift point up, the contradictions of Canadian post-World War II foreign policy. On the one hand, he was a partisan of Team Imperial America and played an important if ultimately limited and junior role in the birth of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation or NATO, an adjunct of American imperial power. On the other hand, he was a cosmopolitan mediator and peacemaker who played a significant role in the birth of the United Nations or the UN. Pearson's peacemaking credentials stemmed from his role in ending the Suez Crisis, for which he won the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize. That "crisis" saw Great Britain, France, and Israel attack Egypt in 1956 in order to take control of the Suez Canal. Pearson's mediation played a major role in the British, French, and Israeli withdrawal from Egypt and from the canal. It would be Pearson's mediation of this conflict that would turn him into saintly hero number one in the pantheon associated with the image of Canada as a peacekeeper nation, an image that would also gain some traction abroad. Despite this saintly image, however, Pearson was no Olof Palme, who was clearly far more non-partisan and non-aligned in the Cold War world than Pearson.

A third Canadian identity culture, according to McKay and Swift, arose around the same time as a revived liberalism with its fetishisation of the Market and the increasing dominance of neoliberalism in the English speaking world in the 1980s. This identity, according to McKay and Swift, is actually a latter day and technologically updated version, with a few new wrinkles thrown in for good measure, of the British Imperial identity culture. In Team Warrior Canada the United States has replaced Great Britain as the dominant power in the Anglosphere alliance of the US and its junior varsity partners the UK, Canada, and, increasingly, I might add, Australia, which recently agreed to allow an expansion of American military bases established in the 1960s and 1990s and the expansion of the number of American military bases on Australian soil.

There is currently, McKay and Swift argue, a culture war between these last two ideal identity types. Since the 1980s and particularly during the prime ministership of Stephen Harper between 2006 and 2015, team warrior nation Canada, with its polemical and apologetic politicians, economic elites, and allied academics, has attempted to rebrand Canada from the peacekeeper nation of a partly imagined Pearson to the warrior nation of Harper. Using strategies similar to those of the Tories in England, the Republicans in the United States, and the Coalition in Australia, warrior nation Canada has attempted to transform Canada from a peacekeeper nation, a nation engaged in UN peacekeeping missions in places like the Middle East, to a Canada that is a warrior nation with strong ties to an increasingly Anglified  and American led NATO whose mission has increasingly become that of preserving and protecting the Anglosphere global order with its unstated mandate of making sure that petroleum flows from the peripheral and semi-peripheral world into the core nation world. They have done this using the tried and true methods right wing demagogues have long used to expand their power and authority; they have played on the fears and anxieties of the masses by emphasising the need for law and order in an increasingly dangerous world both at home and abroad. To combat domestic and foreign dangers team warrior nation Canada has promoted, through their partially government funded think tanks, their partially publicly funded military science programmes in Canadian universities, particularly at the University of Calgary (where Harper took degrees), their academic allies, their veterans sent into schools, and by increasing the links between the Canadian military and Canadian sports, particularly the national sport of Canada, a sport that is central to the Canadian civic faith, hockey, to promote increases in Canadian defence spending and increases in the number of Canadian military personnel. 

The strategies team warrior Canada have used in their attempts to rebrand Canada from a peacekeeper nation to a warrior are, of course, right out of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-anarchist playbook that helped make America a conformist imperial warrior nation. They have demonised domestic critics. They have demonised enemy others. They have sacralised the Canadian military culture. They have marginalised critics by making it impossible for them to condemn military actions by claiming that any such criticism profanes the sacred service Canadian soldiers do. They have condemned and marginalised critics by claiming that they are utopians who don't understand that we live in a dog eat dog social darwinist world. They have claimed that Canada was made by war and by its warriors, starting at places like Vimy Ridge in France where Canadian troops, or so say the warrior historians, fought as Canadians for the first time. They have claimed that it was and is Canada's warriors who protect the true north's proud and free liberties and freedoms. They have claimed that Canada's warriors are chilvalrous white knights whose much needed mission is to protect the rights of all and particularly the rights of put upon women all across the globe, save in places, of course, like Saudi Arabia, a nation that violates civil and human rights, and particularly the rights of women regularly, because the Saudis are Canada's and America's oil buds and central to Canadian and American Middle Eastern policies and strategies.

As was the case with the similar strategies used in the US by people like A. Mitchell Palmer and Joseph McCarthy, the ideologies of team warrior Canada are, as McKay and Swift note, rent through with contradictions, some of which reek with the stench of the newspeak of George Orwell's 1984 and the surrealistic absurdities of Doctor Strangelove and Monty Python's Flying Circus. The government and its military, for instance, which is supposed to preserve and protect human rights, violates them en masse during wartime though you wouldn't know it given their governmental and media newspeak about humanitarian surgical strikes, smart bombs, and collateral damage. The government and its military, which claims to be promoting human rights and stabilising and improving the lives of those who it invades, seems to be more the destroyer of worlds than the builder of "civilised" little neo-West simulations all across the globe. What it does make the world safe for, of course, is American style exploitative corporate capitalism. The government and its military wax romantically about protecting women from misogynist fundamentalist sects, assuming, of course, that their presence in places like Afghanistan actually did improve the position of women before they cut and ran leaving women to their  fates in a post war Afghanistan run by the Taliban, the very enemy they fought and claimed victory over in a seeming repeat of what happened when the US cut and ran in South Vietnam in the 1970s. The government, its military, and its increasingly militarised police forces that are supposed to be preserving and protecting freedoms and liberties at home, has created a 1984 like surveillance state that violates civil liberties on a regular basis both at home and abroad. The government and military that whinges and whines about the welfare state actually eats at the teat of the big welfare state wanting even further redistribution of taxpayers monies from the civilian population to the military (all wrapped up, of course, in a bow of tax cuts for the rich). The government and the peace is our profession military claims that the only way to bring about peace is through never ending wars against an evil abstract enemy. It is hard not to notice that this imagined Canada of warrior princes fighting for Western truth, Western justice, Western manliness, and thimbleberry pie seems to comes right out of a fictive manichean comic book world that is not that different from the tall tales in The Boy's Own Annual. Plus good doubleplus good.

Who will triumph in this identity war between the two identity groups? Stay tuned. In the meantime those of you interested in cultural history, the history of identity, and the militarisation of Canadian, America, and, by extension, Australia society should check out this superb book.